Saturday, September 10, 2016

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Angeline Schellenberg

Angeline Schellenberg’s poems appear
in journals such as CV2, TNQ, Grain,
and Lemon Hound. Her first chapbook, Roads of Stone (the Alfred Gustav
Press), launched in May 2015. Her poetry won third prize in Prairie Fire’s 2014 Banff Centre Bliss
Carman Poetry Award Contest and was shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2015 Poem of the Year. Angeline lives and reads in Winnipeg with her husband, their two
teenagers, and a German shepherd-corgi. Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books) is her first full-length collection.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your
most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The day I got the
email from Brick Book’s acquisitions editor Barry Dempster – asking for
permission to shortlist my manuscript – was one of the happiest days of my
life. Even if Brick had chosen not to publish this book, knowing Barry Dempster
thought my work “had guts” and “resonated” made me feel like I’d become an
author.

How the book will change
my life remains to be seen! I expect it will give me opportunities to see more
of Canada.

The difference between my 2015
chapbook Roads of Stone and this book
is that Roads was inspired by other
people’s stories, whereas Tell Them It
Was Mozart is all about my own. And Mozart
has more variation in form and tone; overall, Mozart is more playful, less serious.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or
non-fiction?

I did go to
non-fiction first because it felt less risky. About ten years ago, I started sending
good news stories about non-profits to a monthly newspaper, and they took them
every time, eventually offering me a mental health column. Now I write/copyedit
part-time for a national church magazine. I love it when an interviewee says
things like “You captured the heart of what we’re about.” I’ve met some
interesting people, from matchmakers to Elvis impersonators.

I always wanted to
do poetry, but there was an anxiety in the way; I was afraid of writing bad
poetry. What I discovered is that all poetry starts as bad poetry. You just
have to keep writing past it. In 2011, my desire overcame my fear.

What I love about
poetry is that I (as a reader and a writer) can dip deep into an emotional
experience, and then come up for air in a hurry. I didn’t need a long attention
span (what mother has one?) or a great memory (lost that too). The intensity of
poetry was perfect for giving others an experience of mothering autism and for
subverting some of the negative messages out there.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does
your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts
appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of
copious notes?

I hear other people talk of running to a notebook because a
great line just popped into their heads. Don’t I wish! I start scribbling and
ideas come only as my pen is moving.

I find the blank page less frightening than the flashing
cursor, so I start with erasable pen in notebooks and then I type out and
rearrange the words on the screen.

I have the rare poem that keeps its original form (I think
the final poem in the book is one of them), but most of them have gone from prose
poems to couplets and back, been turned backwards and upside down.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short
pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a
"book" from the very beginning?

I always work on full manuscripts from the beginning. I
need a topic, otherwise I don’t know where to start. With the autism poems, I
had lists of things I wanted to cover; e.g., drug trials, echolalia, bolting. And
every day, new experiences made the list longer. I never had to wonder what to
write about.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are
you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love public
readings, both as reader and a listener. The spoken poems buzz in my brain, and
the energy of the audience adds to the experience.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds
of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think
the current questions are?

With Tell Them It Was
Mozart, the political questions were always in my head. Am I portraying
autism too negatively and thereby doing a disservice to the autism community
that deserves to have their strengths known? Am I not being honest enough about
the difficulties, thereby disrespecting other parents fighting for support? Am
I putting myself on every psychiatrist’s blacklist by saying this?

Autism conversations can be polarizing. They get derailed
quickly when someone wants their child referred to as “autistic,” and someone
else prefers “person with autism.” Or when one parent thinks a vaccine causes
autism and another says it’s a gluten issue. The very people who might actually
be able to understand one another are sometimes the ones at each other’s
throats. (Mostly it’s because we’re so darn tired!) The book rarely mentions
autism directly (and when it does, it’s usually in the context of found poems)
because the focus is on who the children are, not how they’re labelled.

Your question about questions makes me laugh because, well,
here are the sorts of things Tell Them It
Was Mozart asks: “Have already we watched ‘The Survivor in the Soap’?” “Did
you notice I was holding a banana?” The media asks all kinds of things about
autism. I think these are closer to the right questions.

The main thing I want to get across with this book is joy. The
joy of looking at the world differently.

The joy of connecting as family, even if that looks
different from what you expected.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger
culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer
should be?

I don’t have any
grand notions about changing culture. But eventually 600 people will own a copy
of my book: that’s 600 people who may respond more gently to a child screaming
in a checkout line or flapping his hands at his desk. If even just one reader
tells a mom, “I’m here with you” (instead of “you should have been spayed”),
that’s a big win.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult
or essential (or both)?

Definitely
both!

Murphy’s Law: it
often happens that the poems I want help to completely rewrite, editors beg me
not to touch, whereas the poems that sing in my head are the ones they suggest
I revise or cut completely.

At first, in the
editing process, I had the mental picture of ripping seams, but then I realized
that the fabric was intact. All we were doing was pulling out a few embroidered
flowers and replacing them with equally beautiful songbirds. Then I felt
better.

It was so valuable
to hear an editor say that the effect I was going for wasn’t getting across
yet. The tricky part was clarifying the message without losing the music.
Sometimes I argued for my original, sometimes I fell in love with my editor’s
wording, but more often it led to the creation of something brand new – a very
productive process.

I recently went back
over the many poems that I ached over cutting from the book, to see if I could
turn them into a chapbook. I realized that none of them were worth keeping. And
when I read the proofs, some of the new poems – which I was originally unsure
about adding – became my favourites.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given
to you directly)?

Don McKay told me to “Let
the dog off the leash.” In encouraging me to write more prose poetry, he said, “The lyric is a
bird flying from treetop to treetop. The narrative is the dog sniffing here and
here: it brings home unlikely things.”

In my fear that what flowed
out of me naturally wasn’t “poetic” enough, I’d been privileging the bird and
forgetting the dog. Since then, I’ve given myself more permission to write long
lines about everyday things like vomit and dryers without fear of being prosaic.
It doesn’t have to look like a poem (or smell like roses) to be poetry.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even
have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

On my days off, I get home from dropping my daughter off at
school, walk the dog, make my second cup of coffee, sit down on my sofa at my
south-facing window, and write most of the day. Saturday morning I go straight
to work in my pajamas and don’t stop until “lupper” – like brunch but we eat it
between lunch and suppertime to stretch out that Saturday morning feeling. Sundays after church are another peaceful
time for poetry. Even on days I’m going into the office, I do some
poetry with my first coffee before getting the kids up for school. I write best in the morning – before my inner
critic wakes up. My best time of year is summer when I can sit on my backyard
swing, or by a campfire, or on a dock somewhere and write.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for
(for lack of a better word) inspiration?

When I get stalled writing new material, I rework old
pieces and submit completed ones to journals and contests. Or when it feels
like there aren’t any words in my own head, I write found poetry: erasure,
oulipo, collage.

For inspiration, I reread some of my mentors’ work, until I
hear the encouraging things they’ve told me in the past singing in my head
again. (Don McKay once told me, “You rock!”) I read poets I love, and sometimes
I try finishing one of their sentences and see where it takes me.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The farm where I grew up: lilacs, freshly mowed grass, French
bread baking.

My current home in Winnipeg: bologna, sweaty teenager, and
dog.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are
there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science
or visual art?

Mostly my work comes
from everyday life experiences, either my own or the ones I live vicariously in
conversations with others.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or
simply your life outside of your work?

Joanne Epp and I have workshopped our new poems every month
since 2011. I rarely submit anything without it passing her desk first. Our
styles are different, but I trust her completely.

Meira Cook and Don McKay were a big part of how Tell Them It Was Mozart came together.
Meira mentored me through the Manitoba Writers’ Guild Sheldon Oberman
Mentorship Program in 2012 when I was just starting out. Don McKay was my
instructor at Sage Hill in 2013 when I was getting the manuscript ready for
submission.

Jennifer Still led the first poetry workshop I attended and
many I’ve attended since. She’s the one who directed me to found poetry.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Since my
relationships with my husband of 22 years and with God are the most intimate,
and sometimes the most difficult, I’d like to write great love poems and
devotional poems – both very hard to do well.

I’ve always wanted
to visit the Maritimes. And to take my family to Straubing, Germany – the village
where I lived in the summer of 1993, when I volunteered for an organization
that assisted refugees.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it
be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you
not been a writer?

I wish I could be a
figure skater, contemporary dancer, or gymnast, but since (growing up Mennonite
in the 1970s) I wasn’t allowed to even tap my toes until my twenties, the
connection between my limbs and my brain is lacking.

I enjoy languages,
so I thought of being a translator or linguist. I studied French and German in
high school; and Greek, Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Aramaic in seminary. But two
weeks after earning my MA, I gave birth (trading textbooks for Dr. Seuss) and
promptly forgot all of them.

Clarinet was my
thing in high school, so I considered studying music performance. But I let the
competitiveness of the music scene scare me away. I don’t regret it; writing
does everything music did for me and more.

I love babies. I
think I’d enjoy fostering someday. But I’ve gotten used to not having my
cupboards emptied and sleep interrupted, so it would take some adjustment, for
sure.

Someday I might like
to be a spiritual director. Walking alongside someone through their spiritual
journey is as profound as poetry.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing makes me
happy.

I tried teaching college,
and I could do it, but I hated feeling on the spot for three hours at a time in
front of a room full of bored 18-year-olds. With writing, I can mull over
what I want to say for ages before anyone else needs to hear it.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great
film?

I won’t even try to
comment on cinema. I have two teenagers, so I mostly watch things with Iron Man
in them.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Two years ago, I started a side project about colours. It
was a fun break from the difficult emotional work of confessional poetry. This
research-based work allowed me to write about cultures and history I hadn’t
experienced, to explore my darker, sexier, more exotic side. Now that it’s my
main project, I really miss confessional writing: that satisfaction of moving
something from deep inside me into the world.